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Bethesda Softworks
Bethesda Softworks LLC is an American video game publisher based in Rockville, Maryland. The company was founded by Christopher Weaver in 1986 as a division of Media Technology Limited, and in 1999 became a subsidiary of ZeniMax Media. In its first fifteen years, it was a video game developer and self-published its titles. In 2001, Bethesda spun off its own in-house development team into Bethesda Game Studios, and Bethesda Softworks became a publisher. It also publishes games by ZeniMax Online Studios, id Software, Arkane Studios, MachineGames and Tango Gameworks. In additon to their main YouTube channel, two topic specific channels, Quake Champions and ZenimaxOnlineStudios, and several specific for other countries, the United Kingdom, France, Russia, Spain, Australia, Germany, and Russia. History Company Name and Origins Bethesda Softworks was founded by Weaver in Bethesda, Maryland in 1986 as a division of Media Technology Limited, an engineering research and development firm of which Weaver was founder and CEO. He created Bethesda "to see if the PC market was a viable place to develop games". Vlatko Andonov, who serves as President of Bethesda, recalls that Weaver had originally wanted to call the company "Softworks", but found the name taken. "So, our founder, sitting at his kitchen table in Bethesda decided after laborious thought to add Bethesda to Softworks and there you have it!" 1986-1994: Gridiron!, Electronics Arts Lawsuit, The Elder Scrolls Bethesda Softworks is credited with the creation of the first physics-based sports simulation, Gridiron!, in 1986 for the Atari ST, Commodore Amiga and Commodore 64/128. Early games scored respectably in the gaming press. Electronic Arts was working on the first John Madden Football, and hired Bethesda to help finish developing it, and acquired distribution rights for future versions of Gridiron!. The next year, after no new cross-console version of Gridiron! had been released, Bethesda stopped work on the project and sued Electronic Arts for US$7.3 million, claiming EA halted the release while incorporating many of its elements into Madden. The case was resolved out of court. In 1990, the company moved from Bethesda to Rockville, Maryland. It is best known for its next major project, The Elder Scrolls Role-playing video game series, based on the original programming of Julian Lefay. The first chapter of the series, entitled The Elder Scrolls: Arena, was released in 1994. Several sequels have been released. Bethesda Softworks also published titles based upon film franchises, including The Terminator, Star Trek and Pirates of the Caribbean. 1994-1999: Company Expansion In 1995, Bethesda Softworks acquired the development studio Flashpoint Productions, and its founder, Brent Erickson, became the Development Director of Media Technology's West Coast division, MediaTech West. The division produced several titles including Golf Magazine: 36 Great Holes Starring Fred Couples, Noctropolis and later the Burnout Championship Drag Racing series. In 1997, Bethesda acquired XL Translab, a graphics firm that got its start in Catholic University's School of Architecture. XL eventually moved into a new center in Bethesda Softworks' Rockville headquarters. XL Translab has previously done work for PBS as well as television commercials for Fortune 500 companies. By mid 1997 Bethesda's employee count was 75 and the company had revenues of about $25 million for that year. In 1997 and 1998, Bethesda released two The Elder Scrolls expansions based on Daggerfall's code—Battlespire and Redguard—neither of which enjoyed the success of Daggerfall and Arena. The downturn in sales was not limited just to The Elder Scrolls franchise, and the company considered filing for bankruptcy as a result. 1999-2004: ZeniMax, Christopher Weaver Lawsuit In 1999, Weaver and Robert A. Altman formed a new parent company for Bethesda Softworks known as ZeniMax Media. In an interview with Edge, he described the company as being a top-level administrative structure rather than a "parent company" for its holdings, explaining that "ZeniMax and Bethesda for all intents and purposes are one thing. Bethesda has no accounting department, we have no finance, we have no legal, our legal department and our financial department is ZeniMax, we all operate as one unit." In 2001, Bethesda Game Studios was established, changing Bethesda Softworks to being a publishing brand of ZeniMax Media. In 2002, Weaver stopped being employed by ZeniMax. He later filed a lawsuit against ZeniMax, claiming he was ousted by his new business partners after giving them access to his brand and was owed US$1.2 million in severance pay. ZeniMax filed counterclaims and moved to dismiss the case, claiming Weaver had gone through emails of other employees to find evidence. This dismissal was later vacated on appeal, and the parties settled out of court. Weaver remained a major shareholder in the company: as of 2007, he said that he still owned 33% of ZeniMax's stock. Providence Equity bought 25% of ZeniMax's stock in late 2007, and an additional stake in 2010. 2004-2015: Fallout, Captial Increase, Publishing Expansions In 2007, the Fallout franchise was acquired by Bethesda Softworks from Interplay Entertainment and the development of Fallout 3 was handed over to Bethesda Game Studios.9 Fallout 3 was released on October 28, 2008. Five downloadable content packs for Fallout 3 were released in the year following its release—Operation: Anchorage, The Pitt, Broken Steel, Point Lookout, and Mothership Zeta. Obsidian Entertainment's new Fallout title, Fallout: New Vegas was published in 2010. Fallout 4 was released on November 10, 2015. In September 2009, Bethesda filed a lawsuit against Interplay Entertainment, after being unsatisfied with Interplay's development of the Fallout MMO platform. Bethesda stopped funding the project, and Interplay was forced to abandon work on it. Between 2007 and 2010, Bethesda raised US$450 million in new capital from Providence Equity Partners to fund expansion efforts. In February 2008, the company opened a European publishing arm in London, named ZeniMax Europe, to distribute titles throughout UK/EMEA territories under the Bethesda Softworks brand. This was followed in by opening publishing offices in Tokyo, Frankfurt, Paris, Eindhoven, Hong Kong, Sydney and Moscow in 2008, 2010, 2012, 2013 and 2018 respectively. On June 24, 2009, ZeniMax Media acquired id Software, whose titles, including Rage, would be published by Bethesda Softworks. Between 2009 and 2012, the company expanded publishing operations, with games from independent third party developers such as Rebellion Developments's Rogue Warrior, Artificial Mind and Movement's Wet, Splash Damage's Brink, and inXile's Hunted: The Demon's Forge. In 2011, Bethesda filed a lawsuit against Mojang (makers of Minecraft) for using Scrolls as the name of a new digital card game, which sounded too close to The Elder Scrolls copyrighted by Bethesda. In the early 2010s, Bethesda Softworks published games such as Dishonored, Wolfenstein: The New Order, and The Evil Within. 2015-present: Going Mobile, DOOM Rebooted, and the Controversial Fallout 76 In the mid-2010s, Bethesda began to experiment with new kinds of games, releasing Fallout Shelter, its first mobile, free-to-play game in the summer of 2015. A year later, it released a reboot of id Software's Doom, after several years of development as a failed attempt to produce a sequel to Doom 3. Later that year, Zen Studios released virtual pinball adaptations of three games that Bethesda released during the decade thus far (The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, Fallout 4 and the 2016 reboot of Doom) as the Bethesda Pinball collection for its pinball games. Bethesda then went on to release two more free-to-play mobile games based on the Elder Scrolls series, a card battle game titled The Elder Scrolls: Legends in 2017 and a first-person role-playing game titled The Elder Scrolls: Blades in 2019. When Nintendo unveiled its new hybrid console, the Nintendo Switch, Bethesda expressed support for it and released ports of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and the Doom reboot for that system in November of 2017. A year later, it also ported Fallout Shelter to that system, and has future plans to do the same for its two Elder Scrolls mobile games. In late 2018, Bethesda announced and released its first-ever massive, multiplayer online game, Fallout 76, a prequel to the Fallout series. Upon its initial release, it was given mixed to negative reviews for its poor quality and was embroiled in several other controversies, including problems with tie-in products and a data breach. The following year saw Bethesda releasing sequels to Rage and the Doom reboot, Rage 2 and Doom Eternal. Bethesda Softworks announced a suite of patented game streaming technologies called “Orion” during its E3 2019 press conference. Orion technology is designed to reduce latency, bandwidth and computing power required to deliver a great experience for a streaming video game. The online gaming platform will also allow users to experience gaming with mods on consoles, consumer-ready virtual reality headsets, First Person Shooting feature on 4k resolution with 60 frames per second. This page was created by JakCooperThePlumber on September 4, 2019. Category:Users that joined in 2006 Category:Gaming YouTubers Category:American YouTubers Category:One Million Subscribers